Silk Stockings

The Antonioni retrospective has sparked within me an interest in 50s and 60s cinema. This interest is by no means epicurist, but rather a childlike wonder at the alterity and enduring qualities of the times. This has been in tandem with another new interest in 18th and 19th Century England, what with my reading The Importance of Being Earnest and Sense and Sensibility. And now, I'm tuning into Turner Classic Movies like nobody's business! The channel is quite a treasure, if anyone should care to tune in every now and then. Beyond the value of screening classic movies, TCM screens them daily by themes. For instance, today they will broadcast movies by Stanley Kubrick, starting the day with a documentary on the director. Tomorrow their listings might include the filmography of Robert Wagner. The last few movies of the day will have both Robert Wagner and Natalie Wood in their cast, then segue into a day of Natalie Wood movies. This day will end with West Side Story, starring Natalie Wood and Richard Beymer, and proceed into the following day of Richard Beymer works. Marvelous!

I am juggling my movie-watching with another very time-consuming endeavour: reading. I finished Sense and Sensibility in the last 2 weeks, and now I must get started on Penn Reading Project's pick-of-the-year, Your Inner Fish, a book that all freshmen have been assigned to read and that we will discuss in clusters during orientation.

Sense and Sensibility (Penguin Classics)

Jane Austen

Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body

Neil Shubin